OTTAWA — Canada’s universities are furious that last week’s federal budget included no new funding for basic research, warning that the country is squandering its leadership in cutting-edge fields.

“When it comes to investment in discovery research, the government is currently harvesting the success of previous research investment, harvesting the success of previous governments,” said Paul Davidson, the president of Universities Canada. “This government needs to pay attention to investing in young talent, new talent, attracting talent, retaining talent.”

Instead, he said, he’s heard members calling this the “bupkis budget.” No additional money for research grants, no follow-through on 2021 election promises of funding for 1,000 more Canada Research Chairs and a $500-million fund for student mental health.

Academic research is not something the federal government sees as a problem area. Last year’s federal budget, which focused explicitly on promoting innovation to spur economic growth, cited Canada’s basic research capacity as a strength.

The country’s main obstacle to innovation is “a low rate of private business investment in research, development, and the uptake of new technologies,” the 2022 budget said.

“We have really cutting-edge thinking being done here,” Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland told reporters at the time. “Where the gap is in Canada is translating invention into innovation.”

But shortly before Freeland presented her new budget on March 28, the government released a detailed report from an advisory panel the Liberals assigned to tell them what to do about research funding. It said things aren’t going so well on the invention front, either.

Led by Frédéric Bouchard, dean of arts and sciences at the Université de Montréal, the group issued an alert: Canada’s ramshackle system for funding basic research means “we are not well positioned as a country to address the complex challenges that we are–and will be—facing,” its report said.

Besides calling for new oversight for the major federal granting councils (which are siloed into science and engineering, health, and social sciences and humanities) to make cross-disciplinary work easier to fund, the Bouchard panel called for an immense increase in that funding, which sits at $4 billion a year now.

The panel’s prescription: “As an initial step, we recommend an annual increase of at least 10 per cent for five years to the granting councils’ total base budgets for their core grant programming.”

The new budget did not take that step. In a section titled “Investing in tomorrow’s technology,” the Liberals’ budget listed previous budgets’ boosts to research funding but didn’t add anything new.

“The government is carefully considering the advisory panel’s advice, with more detail to follow in the coming months on further efforts to modernize the system,” the budget read.

Laurie Bouchard, a spokesperson for Innovation Minister François-Philippe Champagne, told The Logic by email that the government is “seized with the important task of building a stronger foundation to support researchers in Canada and ensuring the long-term competitiveness of Canadian science and research, which is why we are currently and carefully considering the panel’s recommendations.”

We have more graduate-level researchers than we used to, inflation means dollars don’t go as far as they used to, and Canada is in a global competition for talent, the Bouchard panel said: “Research funding over the past 20 years simply has not kept pace with these pressures on the research support system. Given the international competition for talent, Canada is at serious risk of another brain drain without reinvestment.”

The budget for the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, for instance, is about 3.7 per cent lower than it was in 2007, after accounting for inflation, while its U.S. counterpart’s is 5.2 per cent higher.

Academic research directly benefits the private sector, said Chad Gaffield, a historian and CEO of U15, an association of research-oriented universities, from UBC to Dalhousie in Halifax. He’s also a former head of the granting council for the social sciences and humanities.

“Canada has built a research and innovation ecosystem that assumes we’re going to build a better future for all Canadians by really taking advantage of the knowledge and talent that is developed by our universities,” he told The Logic during a break from meeting in Calgary with his member universities’ vice-presidents of research. “We have invested in universities that are closely connected to the larger society—the private sector, public sector, non-profit sector. And we just can’t take that for granted.”

Peer countries—such as the United States with last year’s CHIPS and Science Act—have invested heavily in basic research, Gaffield said. Canada’s federal budget responded to the Biden administration’s industrial policy, but not to its research policy.

Canada ranks well internationally in the proportion of the population with post-secondary credentials, Gaffield said, but the numbers are juiced by an outsized number of people with college diplomas. When it comes to the percentage of people with graduate degrees, he noted, Canada ranks 28th among 38 countries in the Organisation for Economic Development and Co-operation.

“If you want to build an economy and society that’s really up the value chain, that is not simply a kind of branch plant in a knowledge-based economy, you have to ensure … that you have those real innovators and drivers of innovation,” he said.

The lag is being noticed internationally, Gaffield said, pointing to recent stories in Times Higher Education and the journal Science.

“There’s just a lot of concern,” he said. “We don’t want to lose our best and brightest.”

The Bouchard report offers its own cornucopia of grim quotes about the consequences:

• “Without internationally competitive funding for investigator-initiated research, Canada will fall behind in an increasingly competitive global marketplace and lose its status as an international magnet for talent and a research collaborator of choice.”
• “To put it starkly, current support for graduate students—the researchers of tomorrow—is at a breaking point.”
• “Under the current funding approach [for major research facilities], funding is fragmented across federal and provincial governments, host institutions and stakeholders. In fact, the level of federal funding is lower in Canada than it is among comparable countries, which treat [those facilities] as national assets and fund the facilities at higher levels.”

Davidson said universities in Canada toughed their way through the COVID-19 pandemic without broad federal supports (albeit with lots of targeted funding for certain types of research). 

“We’re in a post-pandemic environment now. Look at what Japan is doing, look at what the U.S. is doing, look at what Germany is doing,” he said. “They have got ambition, they have got targets, and they recognize that discovery research and investment in talent is going to be key to the next decade.”

Though the Bouchard panel called its recommended hike for federal granting councils an “immediate priority,” any such hike will wait. 

That’s not urgent enough, said Davidson.

“Every month of delay is a month where we are losing the talent we have developed,” he said.

Canada is a leader in fields like batteries and artificial intelligence now, but needs to keep working in those areas if it wants to lead the world in the green transition the 2023 budget envisions, Davidson said.

“A government or a country that fails to do that ends up being 21st-century hewers of wood and drawers of water—or 21st-century hewers of critical minerals,” he said.